The ORIGINAL gathering place for a merry band of Three Percenters. (As denounced by Bill Clinton on CNN!)

Sunday, April 11, 2010

You ain't gonna believe this. But, then again, it is merely the worst attack of the collectivist conflation ass-hats so far, so maybe you will.

Why does this brown-scare stuff sound like the doppelganger of the way Newsweek wrote up Huey P. Newton in the '60s. "Look out, progressive metrosexual big government nanny state man! White gun nuts are gonna get yo momma!" Only thing is, Stewart Rhodes is also descended from Mexican farmworkers with a little Apache thrown in. Inconvenient facts get ignored, I guess. Sheesh. Here. Read it yourself and puke.

Stewart Rhodes does not seem like an extremist. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and a former U.S. Army paratrooper and congressional staffer. He is not at all secretive. In February he was sitting at a table at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at a fancy downtown hotel in Washington, handing out fliers and selling T shirts for his organization, the Oath Keepers. Rhodes says he has 6,000 dues-paying members, active and retired police and military, who promise never to take orders to disarm U.S. citizens or herd them into concentration camps. Rhodes told a NEWSWEEK reporter, "We're not a militia." Oath Keepers do not run around the woods on the weekend shooting weapons or threatening the violent overthrow of the government. Their oath is to uphold the Constitution and defend the American people from dictatorship.

But by conjuring up the specter of revolution—or counterrevolution—is Rhodes adding to the threat of real violence? Oath Keepers are "a particularly worrisome example of the 'patriot' revival," according to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors hate speech and extremist organizations. "Patriot" groups—described by the SPLC as outfits "that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose 'one-world government' on liberty-loving Americans"—are "roaring back" after years out of the limelight, according to Potok. Notorious in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the patriot groups seemed to fade away under the shadow of 9/11, but hard times and the nation's first African-American president seem to have brought about a revival—from 149 groups in 2008 to 512 (127 of them militias) in 2009, according to the SPLC.

It is easy to exaggerate the numbers of these groups or the threat they pose, especially if you are an organization, like the SPLC, dedicated to exposing such things. Extremist outfits have come and gone over the years. With their preening and prancing about in Nazi garb or white robes, skinheads and white supremacists are often more about showing off than committing acts of violence. Law-enforcement experts worry more about "lone wolves," disturbed loners with military training, like Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, than they do about loudmouth militia groups. But the feds and local authorities will be watching closely on April 19, when the Oath Keepers mark their first anniversary and join a Second Amendment March on Washington to celebrate the right to bear arms. The Oath Keepers say they are commemorating the first shots of the Revolutionary War fired at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, but April 19 is also the anniversary of the end of the FBI siege at Waco, Texas, in 1993, as well as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

This is a season, or perhaps an era, when politics seem more intense than usual, and the domestic extremist threat seems more real. Partisan disputes are rarely pretty, but lately they have taken a particularly ugly, menacing turn. Last week the FBI arrested individuals for making death threats against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington for their votes on health-care reform. A series of expletive-strewn voice-mail messages left for Senator Murray were particularly creepy: "You're gonna have a target on your back for the rest of your life," the caller warned. "How long do you think you can hide?"

Senate Sergeant at Arms Terrance W. Gainer said last week that serious threats to members of Congress had nearly tripled, from 15 in the last three months of 2009 to 42 in the first quarter of 2010, with most of them coming in March during the height of the health-care debate. Some of the calls and e-mails were "very vicious" and included threats to members' homes and families. "You had people saying, 'I'm going to get your kids, I'm going to get your wife,' " says Gainer. "It was very disturbing to members."

After the health-reform vote, a tea-party activist in Lynchburg, Va., posted an address for Rep. Tom Perriello on his blog and encouraged readers to "drop by" and express their anger over Perriello's vote for the bill. The blogger got the address wrong. Perriello's brother returned home that day to find that someone had cut the line to a -propane-gas tank behind his home. The fact that haters are sometimes incompetent renders them only marginally less frightening. Some threats come from people who are truly unhinged. Federal authorities have charged a man with multiple-personality disorder with threatening in a YouTube video to kill Rep. Eric Cantor; the suspect is not competent to stand trial.

Economic distress and social change make for fear, and fear makes for anger, now and always. Night riders terrorized the defenseless after the Civil War. During the Great Depression, two demagogues in particular whipped up conspiracy theories against Jewish bankers and the rich elites to arouse angry mass movements. Huey Long, governor of Louisiana, later a U.S. senator who wanted to soak the rich, and Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic Catholic priest whose radio show reached 40 million people, seemed a political threat to FDR, until Long was assassinated and Coughlin became increasingly unhinged.

"There was a lot of hatred in the 1930s," says Alan Brinkley, the Columbia University historian and expert on populist movements. But the currentsurge of fear and loathing toward Obama is "scary," he says. "There's a big dose of race behind the real crazies, the ones who take their guns to public meetings. I can't see this happening if McCain were president, or [any] white male." (Secret Service spokespeople reported spikes in threats against Obama after his election and inauguration, but they've also said the president generally receives about the same number of threats as did Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. They've declined to comment on whether there's been a spike in threats related to health-care reform.)

Fear of "the other" has long fueled hate crimes, from the torture and lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan beginning in the late 1800s, to the violence of the 1950s and '60s, to the virulent anti-immigrant groups today. In 2008 the Census Bureau announced that whites will make up only half the U.S. population in 2050. "That was a big deal," says the SPLC's Potok. In recent years white-power groups mushroomed and the Klan reversed declining membership.

The Internet has made it easy to express hatred, and may act as a kind of safety valve. But the Internet can also abet twisted minds with vitriol and practical tips, like how to make a bomb.

Middle-aged guys sitting around their basements fantasizing are one thing; addled war veterans with weapons training are another. Timothy McVeigh was a Gulf War veteran who read white-supremacist literature and the sort of books that predict a takeover by one-world government agents flying black helicopters. He has, or had, some potential heirs apparent in a recently indicted group called the Hutaree, a Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio-based militia. According to the Hutaree Web site, the group ranked its followers with weird sci-fi titles like "Radok" and "Arkon." The Hutaree militiamen speculate that the Antichrist is Javier Solana, a former NATO secretary-general and senior official of the European Union. The evidence? "There is a virtual media blackout on this man," writes John Reynolds, author of a screed on Solana and the Antichrist on the Hutaree Web site. "I see Jacques Chirac and Silvio Burlusconi [sic], Tony Blair, and Prince Charles on the TV all of the time, yet not a word one regarding Solana. Why not?" ("Mr. Solana has now retired and is an elderly private gentleman. This is quite insane," says a spokesman for the European Union's Washington diplomatic mission.)

The rambling rants of the Hutaree might seem funny, in a sick sort of way, but they are far from harmless. The FBI busted nine members last month for allegedly plotting to trigger an "uprising" against the government by assassinating a local police officer and then ambushing colleagues who attended the funeral by blowing up improvised explosive devices. They may have had some professional instruction: one of the men in the group, Michael Meeks, is a Persian Gulf War veteran who served four years in the Marines and was a decorated rifle expert, according to Marine Corps records. Another member, Kristopher Sickles, is an Army vet (discharged "under other than honorable conditions," according to prosecutors). William Swor, the lawyer for Hutaree leader David Brian Stone, says there is no evidence the group was doing anything other than exercising its First Amendment rights.

The Internet offers a dark social network for militiamen and real soldiers. A July 2008 FBI intelligence report by the bureau's counterterrorism division warned that white-supremacist leaders were encouraging followers to "infiltrate the military as 'ghost skins' in order to recruit and receive training for the benefit of the extremist movement." (The report said the hate-group leaders were especially interested in planting moles without any documented history with neo-Nazi groups or "overt racist insignia such as tattoos" so they could more easily slip by military recruiters. The FBI identified 203 people with confirmed or claimed military service who were active in ex-tremist groups. On the NewSaxon.org Web site for white supremacists, a blogger called "shadowman" posted a photo of a U.S. Army enlisted man in camouflage carrying a weapon with the boast "i am a professional killer?.?.?.?a soldier born of war." The Defense Department has long had a "zero tolerance" policy for membership in extremist groups, but last November the Pentagon quietly tightened its regulations governing such activity, a Pentagon official confirmed to newsweek. Not only are service members barred from "active participation" in such groups, they also may not "actively advocate supremacist doctrine, ideology, or causes," according to a copy of the Pentagon regulation.

It is hard to know how much such grim fantasies are stirred by the steady stream of conspiracy theories pushed by talk-radio hosts. Rush Limbaugh talks about the Democrats planning to "kill you" with health-care reform and suggests (agreeing with black Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan, of all people) that it "seems perfectly within the realm of reality" that the H1N1 vaccine was "developed to kill people." Like many talk-show hosts, he uses martial language to rouse the faithful: "The enemy camp is the White House right now," he says. Former Alaska governor turned media star Sarah Palin posted on her Facebook page a list of House Democrats who voted for health-care reform with crosshairs aimed at their home districts, while tweeting to her followers, "Don't Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!" She strongly denied any intent to incite violence. Other conservative talkers insist their foes are preparing violent attacks on them. Glenn Beck of Fox News is the master purveyor of this particular brand of sly paranoia. He suggests that he will be the victim of violence. "I'd better start wearing a [bulletproof] vest" to guard against White House attacks, he says, and warns that the Democrats will sic goons on him to break his kneecaps. Some talk-show hosts see the risk of going too far. Bill O'Reilly, the top-rated talker on Fox News, interviewed Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers in February and treated him coolly. After the interview O'Reilly said to his audience, "We have a system to uphold the Constitution. It is called the judicial branch. The Supreme Court. The Oath Keepers are not the system." Wise words, but it's a sign of disturbing times that O'Reilly felt required to say them.

29 comments:

"The Oath Keepers are not part of that system." Yeah they are, they fought all the wars so you could denounce them once they got back home and now they have to fix it because you would rather have a TV show than side with the people!

The Oath Keepers have ALWAYS been the system and STILL are THE system. That is the point. Just because there are those who do not uphold their oath and are in a position of Responsibility and Trust to do so and DO NOT UPHOLD THEIR OATH does not mean there are not those of us out there who REMAIN and will be faithful to their oath and WILL UPHOLD that OATH and Replace the former! I am pissed off and tired of these "Chicken Dick's" so if my sentence structure along with my grammar do not make you warm and fuzzy......well, Go fuck yourself!

Not part of the system? O'Reilly amazes me with his lack of understanding.

The checks and balances exist to save us the trouble of fixing these things ourselves. The SCOTUS -IS NOT- the final arbiter of what constitutes "the consent of the governed", or even what is right or wrong. We are. The people.

Oath Keepers and 3% ers are "extremists"???

Oh come on. Wake up. The founding fathers make us ALL look like a bunch of grannies. These people need to study the Revolution from the British perspective to get an idea of how "extremist" our forefathers were. The quickest way to be seen as a threat to the statist/collectivist is to mouth the words of Patrick Henry or Jefferson.

Well, their psychological projections should confirm one salient, if often ignored point:

While the so-called "radical right" really is not racist, THEY ARE and for some reason, they seek to destroy the straight, white, Christian man. Lord knows the mere sight of one throws these people into apoplexy (as my dear departed mother was fond of saying).

Maybe the number of Anti-Government Militias are rising because we have a Anti-American Administration and Legislation in Washington, don't ya think. And further more Oath Keepers are NOT any kind of Militia,These are Men and Women who have,and do on a day to day basis defend the rights of ASSWIPES like this Shit for Brains writer/publisher to Spew forth such B/S. Instead of thanking these people for the duties that they perform this Ass Hole has the nerve to criticise. Well I for One want to say thank you to the Oath Keepers that came before me for protecting U.S. AGAINST ALL ENEMIES BOTH FORINGE AND DOMESTIC!!! EMPASIS ON DOMESTIC!!! And Mark Potok you sir, can Kiss My Ass !!! even though You are Not worthy of such exalted endevors.

The only racism I see is from the Affirmative Action programs and minority business quotas. And pro-Costitutional groups are now racist hate groups? Well, I'll have to see for myself on the 19th! See y'all then!

Our cause is just. Our union is perfect. Our internal resources are great, and, if necessary, foreign assistance is undoubtedly attainable.—We gratefully acknowledge, as signal instances of the Divine favour towards us, that his Providence would not permit us to be called into this severe controversy, until we were grown up to our present strength, had been previously exercised in warlike operation, and possessed of the means of defending ourselves. With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare, that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers, which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverence, employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live slaves.

Lest this declaration should disquiet the minds of our friends and fellow-subjects in any part of the empire, we assure them that we mean not to dissolve that union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely wish to see restored.—Necessity has not yet driven us into that desperate measure, or induced us to excite any other nation to war against them.—We have not raised armies with ambitious designs of separating from Great-Britain, and establishing independent states. We fight not for glory or for conquest. We exhibit to mankind the remarkable spectacle of a people attacked by unprovoked enemies, without any imputation or even suspicion of offence. They boast of their privileges and civilization, and yet proffer no milder conditions than servitude or death.

In our own native land, in defence of the freedom that is our birthright, and which we ever enjoyed till the late violation of it—for the protection of our property, acquired solely by the honest industry of our fore-fathers and ourselves, against violence actually offered, we have taken up arms. We shall lay them down when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, and all danger of their being renewed shall be removed, and not before.

With an humble confidence in the mercies of the supreme and impartial Judge and Ruler of the Universe, we most devoutly implore his divine goodness to protect us happily through this great conflict, to dispose our adversaries to reconciliation on reasonable terms, and thereby to relieve the empire from the calamities of civil war.

"There's a big dose of race behind the real crazies, the ones who take their guns to public meetings."

Ever since a Black man carried a gun at an Arizona protest. The party that brought us the Ku Klux Klan has been in an Insane panic.

They even reported that he was White!?

Perhaps what they are afraid of is that Black people may hold a grudge for all that Murder and Terrorism the Democrats inflicted on them? If so they need desperately to deflect it somehow.

As for the professional race baiters Evan Thomas and Eve Conant at NEWSWEEK. If I suggested what should be done with America's Paul Joseph Goebbels "Big Lie" Media types. Mike would rightly not put up this post.

O'Reilly is playing one side of the issue and Beck the other. They are talking heads. They are voices of propaganda. They are bullshit artists. They are cowardly word slingers. We do not give a shit about their words.

Should we be forced to defend our Republic with arms, these two will be cowering behind their desks, sitting in puddles of piss.

I am mortally tired of these liars and their hatred of my America. Since I do not wish my mortality to be terminated by mere fatigue, and since I am the mortal enemy of those who would destroy this Nation...

"Should we be forced to defend our Republic with arms, these two will be cowering behind their desks, sitting in puddles of piss."

You may be a day late on that thought; the way that both Beck and O'Reilly, the douchebag brothers, sometimes get a silent smirk during a pause in their rants, they may be quietly pissing or crapping their silk boxers just for a moment's amusement.

Unfortunately, we the people canNOT rely on the Supreme Court to rule according to the constitution. They have proven their inability to do that over and over again. We the People canNOT rely on the ballot box because it has been shown time and time again to have been compromised. We the People canNOT rely on the soap box because, as we recently experienced, the Congress and the current occupier of the Oval Office ignores the will of the majority of the People!

So, we the people canNOT rely on the jury box, the ballot box nor the soap box. That only leaves one box upon which We the People can truly rely.

I don't know what it is with O'Reilly. It's like he wants to be a conservative, then he opens his mouth and out comes idiocy.

I stopped watching or listening to him after he blathered on a couple years ago about how the Internet needed filters against uploaded content. My email to him: 'Congratulations, that's the same thing Hillary Clinton espouses.'

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

On the efficacy of passive resistance in the face of the collectivist beast. . .

Had the Japanese got as far as India, Gandhi's theories of "passive resistance" would have floated down the Ganges River with his bayoneted, beheaded carcass. -- Mike Vanderboegh.

In the future . . .

When the histories are written, “National Rifle Association” will be cross-referenced with “Judenrat.” -- Mike Vanderboegh to Sebastian at "Snowflakes in Hell"

"Smash the bloody mirror."

If you find yourself through the looking glass, where the verities of the world you knew and loved no longer apply, there is only one thing to do. Knock the Red Queen on her ass, turn around, and smash the bloody mirror. -- Mike Vanderboegh

From Kurt Hoffman over at Armed and Safe.

"I believe that being despised by the despicable is as good as being admired by the admirable."

From long experience myself, I can only say, "You betcha."

"Only cowards dare cringe."

The fears of man are many. He fears the shadow of death and the closed doors of the future. He is afraid for his friends and for his sons and of the specter of tomorrow. All his life's journey he walks in the lonely corridors of his controlled fears, if he is a man. For only fools will strut, and only cowards dare cringe. -- James Warner Bellah, "Spanish Man's Grave" in Reveille, Curtis Publishing, 1947.

"We fight an enemy that never sleeps."

"As our enemies work bit by bit to deconstruct, we must work bit by bit to REconstruct. Be mindful where we should be. Set goals. We fight an enemy that never sleeps. We must learn to sleep less." -- Mike H. at What McAuliffe Said

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.